As far as I understand, Europe will push for removable batteries by 2027.. So we might actually get back to those glory days.
Take away user choice, use really bad excuses like water proofing and space saving, and you can be sure consumers will iteratively buy more frequently and spend more for cloud services.
Bye battery Bye bye headphone jack Bye bye user expandable storage.
Capitalism has steered us to this as the preferable product.
A lot of anti-user design choices were first introduced by the iPhone. As someone who has owned iPhones since the iPhone 3G, I blame myself.
Some still do. I just started working at Walmart, and they give you a Samsung phone to do your job. You use the camera for scanning tags, shelving, check item status, and a bunch of other shit. It's a modern phone, with USB c, fingerprint sensor in the power button, android 13, stupid hole-punch camera, etc. And when I pulled off the otterbox case they gave me with it, I found that the back pulls off and the battery pops out, like all of my phones used to do back in the day. I assume that's so they can more easily keep these phones in use, as they can pull out a failing battery and pop a new one in without having to send the phone sent off for servicing.
Recently switched from a certain predatory fruity phone to a phone from a certain Dutch manufacturer that has removable battery and replaceable parts. At some point, it got water damaged, and the charging circuit stopped working. While I'm waiting for the replacement part to arrive, I can continue using it by charging the battery with a bench power supply. Feels good man!
Planned obsolescence
I suspect that this was considered a feature when it was fist envisioned and technology progressed so quickly that you needed a new phone each year just to use available services. In that light, it didn't matter if your battery only lasted 2 years.
Now that you can run your cell phone easily for 5 - 7 years, batteries are important again. Thank you EU for requiring replaceable ones in the future, you may have helped the entire world.
They also had keyboards that worked well and there was even real competition for on-screen keyboards until Google bought out and dissolved the best keyboard because they really want your ducking typing data.
It didn't have a removable battery, but I used to use an older Asus Zenfone 3 ZE552KL that really kicked arse.
It had cards slots, a headphone jack, a built in radio that used wired headphones for signal, and the damned thing was as reasonably waterproof as I could imagine a smartphone to be. It's camera was pretty great for the price, too.
Well, one day it fell very hard on a sharp rock, and the screen shattered. The crack made a hole a few milimeteres deep, and it was about a centimetre wide. It might not sound like much, but the crack in the screen was very much there. My happy arse managed to then have it fall out of my pocket and right into the flush of a high-powered toilet.
I left it to dry for one day, and it worked almost like new again. It still powers up today, but the since security updates stopped years ago, i don't use it anymore. IIRC, it wasn't too expensive, but I forget if there was a sale going on at the time.
I hope I can find another phone like that around that general price point one day. I can dream haha.
Having worked in the industry at that time, there were 2 main reasons they did it like that
- batteries were quite unreliable and failed often
- mfgrs couldn't afford to have one year warranties and send out field replacement units for a battery
And the reasons they stopped doing it..
- batteries got better
- battery contact failure was higher than battery failure.
- replaceable batteries compromise waterproofing
I think they should still be replacible, but they should have better connectors that are sealed off from the rest of the device. It costs a tiny bit more to do that engineering though.
EU to the rescue
More and more they are trying to turn everything into a black box. I am assuming it is more convenient and profitable for them.
AlL tHe bEtTeR tO wAtErPrOoF yOu WiTh, My DeAr
With early smart phones generation there was basically a race to thinner smartphones. Replaceable batteries need a protective shell so it wouldn’t get damaged easily when idiots fumble with it when they replace the battery. But the protective shell takes up space. So the first thing they did to make phones thinner was to remove the replaceable battery and just use a battery without a protective shell. Also Apple proofed that most people don’t care so all the Android phone makers followed suit.
Grandma is right on this one!
Lemmy: "I want my removable batteries and headphones jacks!"
Manufacturers: "Are you willing to pay more because nobody else wants that and there'd be extra engineering costs to keep it to spec on things like water resistance?"
Lemmy: >:[ proceedes to buy it anyways and complain about it being so much bigger than other phones "I don't have giant hands!"
It wasn't all that useful.
Instead of the battery dying and you throwing your phone away, it just happened that the battery died, and you searched for a compatible one, that either didn't exist or cost 70% of the price of a new phone, so you threw your phone away.
Now, if you want to talk about standard battery sizes, I'm listening.
I use an
HTCTCL vive. I can text, place phone calls, and barely take a picture, but god damn it I can replace the battery.It's a pain. I love replaceable batteries too. It took me hours to change mine on my pixel. But why is it hard to get out: phones are slimmer and processor more. So you need to get the battery wedged in there and properly thermally insulated. It's a lot harder to do that while also making it easily field replaceable
Hurtful
Meh that's easy. Thin, glasslike, uniform exterior aesthetic.
This format, man... It's hard. I fear its potential. It threatens me.
Used to?
This message was send from a Fairphone
